Ultima V: Exploits?

[EdmSaleBoy]

After playing the game to death, I don't feel at all ashamed about
finding some exploits in the game. Just wondering if anyone else out
there had some interesting ones besides these two:

1) Wealth, Power, and Piety: I think a lot of people know about this
one. You can do this right from the start of the game. Go get the
skull keys from Minoc from the odd tree in the northwest corner of
town. Leave the town and pass a day, and go back in and get more.
Repeat until you have lots. Then go back to Lord British's castle.
Go into the basement, unlock the magically locked door on the south
wall, and loot the chests inside. Go back up a level, and then back
down (so that the chests re-appear) and repeat the process until you
are satisfied. Then go sell all the loot (except the magic-axes you
might find of course!) at your favorite armory. You will easily have
9999 gold, and maybe even 0 karma (ctrl-K to check). Buy your ships,
get your magical weapons for everyone (and some to spare), buy your
gems and max out your reagents, and then do the above process again
until you have 9999 gold again. Then go to a shrine, do the quest,
come back and donate all your money there so that you have all your
ill-gotten loot, 99 karma, and about 1000 gold left over to boot!

2) Dirty Rotten Scoundrel: I discovered this one more recently.
Basically, a cheap way get your attributes up is first to do whatever
diabolical scheme you want to get your Karma to absolute 0. Then
attack some guards and get your butt kicked. Lord British will
ressurect you, chastise you (naturally :) ), and drop you to level 1
with 0 experience and 75 karma. You will keep your items, so it's
handy to do this trick with a magic-axe readied. Go outside to the
world and hunt some orcs and sharks to get 100 experience. Once
there, Hole up and Camp until Lord British appears and raises your
level (and attributes!). Then die again. You will lose one level
because your Karma is 75 (I think you lose one level as a minimum when
you die), but you'll ressurect with about 80 experience points!
Proceed directly outside and kill five orcs, Hole up and Camp, raise
level and attributes, die, repeat. It's a remarkably quick way to get
your avatar to 30 level attributes quickly.

Anyone else have anything?

[Tristan Miller]

Greetings.

Post by EdmSaleBoy
After playing the game to death, I don't feel at all ashamed about
finding some exploits in the game. Just wondering if anyone else out
1) Wealth, Power, and Piety: I think a lot of people know about this
one. You can do this right from the start of the game. Go get the
skull keys from Minoc from the odd tree in the northwest corner of
town. Leave the town and pass a day, and go back in and get more.
Repeat until you have lots. Then go back to Lord British's castle.
Go into the basement, unlock the magically locked door on the south
wall, and loot the chests inside.

This never worked on the C64 version (for me, anyway); Lord British's chests
rarely had anything more than a couple gold coins, a scrap of food, and
maybe a torch or two.

Post by EdmSaleBoy
Anyone else have anything?

1) The game allows you only one glass sword at a time in your inventory.
However, you can get as many glass swords as you have characters, plus one,
by equipping the glass swords as you dig them up.

2) Lord British's magic carpet is replenished every time you re-enter Castle
Britannia. It's useful to exploit this and carry around a couple spares.

3) The "dragon room trick" discussed recently here.

4) IIRC, some magic spells can be increased in potency by using more than
the required number of reagents.

5) A useful way to generate monsters to fight is to fly a magic carpet onto
a small island in a river and then pass the night away by holding down the
space bar. This is particularly useful if desert is in view, as it will
attract treasure-laden sandtraps.

6) To get into areas of Britannia or the Underworld that would normally be
inaccessible or inconvenient to reach, flip the Britannia/Underworld disk.
As you move, the game will load new portions of the map from the opposite
side of the world. Once you've crossed the obstacle, flip the disk back
again.

That's all I can think of at the moment... these are all useful tricks and
exploits; there are a few more that don't really do much but fall into the,
"Hey, that's cool" category.

Regards,
Tristan